The Love Where Death Has Set His Seal
by pale-jonquil
Summary: Shortly before the Greek Resistance starts, Heracles and Arthur have a chat about a man who was not great - but he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know.


**The Love Where Death Has Set His Seal**

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s_omewhere, Greece  
sometime, 1941_

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Heracles rarely lets something as trendy as anger get the better of him, choosing instead to simply take the many burdens of life in stride.

(Anger — English, from the ancient Greek ἄγχω. _To strangle, gag.)_

But he does allow himself to become annoyed, and frequently.

Take the countless representations of his mother's likeness, for example. He has never found one that completely satisfied him, and he's accepted the fact he may not _ever_ discover one that truly does her justice.

From his seat on the pavement, cross-legged and covered in dirt, restless for all his endless fatigue, he squints up at _yet another_ statue that does not resemble his mother. There's another person carved from marble standing with her, wrapped in her arms, and Heracles wonders if this man's likeness is anything at all like his original.

"Is that really what Lord Byron looked like?"

Hunched over and nursing a cigarette beside him, Arthur glances up at the statue, considering.

_Tall. Heroic. The approval of antiquity. A beautiful companion on his arm._

"It's how he would have preferred to be remembered," he eventually says.

"I wish I could've met him. He was truly a great man."

Halfway to bringing the cigarette up to his lips, Arthur snorts. "Hardly."

"You wouldn't say so? He belongs to you, you know."

"Oh, I wouldn't do him the dishonor of claiming him. He gave up on me a long time ago."

Heracles shifts on the ground, dislodging a pebble from beneath his thigh, his hand brushing against the butt of his rifle as he does so.

"Yes, I was proud of him," Arthur continues, tugging a hand through his matted, sweaty hair. "And that is why it hurt so damn much when he left. Though there is some consolation in the fact that he never left me for _France,_ as some did. But I shall never forget the hurt and anger in his eyes the last time I was in his company."

Heracles passively looks on as Arthur watches the statue — not admiring, not gazing, but _watching,_ intense, as though he were waiting for some sort of action on the statue's part — _you accept this goddam apology right this instant, or so help me!_ he can easily imagine Arthur shouting, shaking his fist at the marble figure. It makes Heracles chuckle.

Arthur tears his eyes away from the statue long enough to stub out his cigarette on the pavement.

"Yes," he repeats, his voice a low, thoughtful murmur, the last of the smoke escaping from his lips. "I was very proud of him. Very proud."

"Then — "

"He was a brilliant poet. But a great _man?" _Arthur scoffs and shakes his head. "Good Lord, no. Even he himself would laugh were he to hear you say it. He wouldn't tell you to take the compliment back, mind, and he'd _certainly_ expect it to be followed by a string of other compliments, each more fantastic than the previous. But later — alone — he'd laugh, because he didn't particularly understand himself, but he _was_ aware of what he was."

"Oh, yeah? And what was that?"

"He was a man just like the rest of us. His poetry was often great. He, himself, rarely was."

"Maybe there was a side of him here you didn't see," Heracles says, and — he's not annoyed. Not yet. But he does wish to make Arthur _see._

"And there were sides of him in England that _you_ didn't see."

(Arthur, always so foul-of-face, dragging his horrible English weather along with him wherever he goes. Hunched over, looking far older than Heracles himself actually feels and chronologically is. What can it be that separates them so, even now?)

(Ἄγχω.)

"Oh, don't let's _pout_ about it," Arthur grumbles, reaching into his uniform jacket and pulling out his packet of cigarettes. "Lesser people have had greater monuments erected to them."

He holds out the cigarettes to Heracles, offering him one. (Or two, or three, or the whole damn packet. However many he needs.)

"But now that I think on it — and I'll have you know I don't much appreciate your turning me so damn wistful and sentimental, it's _bloody rude_ — but perhaps that's exactly what you and I need at the moment. Men like him."

"I'm confused," Heracles says, taking the cigarette and rolling it between his fingers. "You said he wasn't really all that great?"

"No, he wasn't. But in my land, we have a saying — that he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

"Oh, yeah?"

Maybe it doesn't take great men to win wars or lead resistances, Heracles suddenly thinks, gazing up at Byron and the woman who would be his mother. Maybe all it takes is men who are angry.

(Men made so mad, so bad, so dangerous in their anger all they see is hateful _red _— red for miles and miles and _years. _Red caked under their fingernails from the blood that might be their own or might belong to their enemy, or, in a perfect world, _both._ This red flame of the unquenchable fire the Nazis, the _occupiers,_ fanned — the fire they themselves started but will be powerless to put out. This fire won't die until _they_ do.)

The cigarette momentarily forgotten, Heracles glances at his rifle lying between them, at Arthur's pistol nestled beside it.

Maybe sometimes anger isn't trendy. Maybe sometimes it's righteous.

And maybe every great man is just a man who was once very, very angry.

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"The love where death has set his seal" is a line from Byron's poem _And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair. _

Please excuse me if I used the Greek word incorrectly.

"Somewhere" in Greece is a lie. The statue they're looking at is actually in Athens, though I imagine there are probably several other statues of Lord Byron in Greece they could have been looking at. Byron died in Missolonghi in 1824 while helping the Greeks fight for independence from the Ottomans. When he died, the Greeks revered him as a national hero (though it wasn't until _1969_ that his own country finally got around to commemorating him with plaque in Westminster Abbey). Byron wasn't in Greece for very long, so it's entirely possible that Heracles never got a chance to meet him, especially seeing as he was probably dealing with other parts of the Revolution at the time, not to mention Sadiq.


End file.
